New note: problems with Gemini

content/notes/problems-with-gemini.md

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+---
+title: "Problems with Gemini"
+date: 2022-09-05T21:43:11-07:00
+replyURI: "https://nya.social/notes/818310555359e1292a5f9b15"
+replyTitle: "Hey what if we remade Gopher but closed it off to older machines by forcing usage of TLS?"
+replyType: "SocialMediaPosting"
+replyAuthor: "@allison@nya.social"
+replyAuthorURI: "https://nya.social/@allison"
+---
+You can [run TLS 1.2 and 1.3 on plenty of 90s-era setups](https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/07/crypto-ancienne-20-now-brings-tls-13-to.html). A typical Gemini page is small, so you might have to blink twice while ChaCha-POLY1305 does its thing. TLS might exclude retro servers, but not clients.
+
+If Gemini had these changes, I'd be happy:
+
+- Use something better than TOFU-based TLS for transit encryption (Tor, Yggdrasil, DANE-based-TLS, etc.)
+
+- If using TLS: use a small subset of TLS 1.3. Maybe just stick to ECDSA + ChaCha-POLY1305.
+
+- Drop ASCII art: overloading programming-language indicators and ASCII-art alt-text is an accessibility hazard
+
+- Add some sort of "download finished without aborting early" indicator (e.g. something like Content-Length)
+
+- Add some way to reliably work with a larger page, e.g. using compression or range-requests with pagination. My full-text Atom feed is almost 1 mb uncompressed, but under 200 kb with Brotli compression. Downloading a full-text export of my Gemini capsule without a content-length header or compression sounds bad.
+
+The main thing I like about Gemtext is links on their own lines. This gets people to use longer/descriptive link text and also makes them serve as navigational aids better than their HTML counterparts.
+
+Honestly, I'm less interested in the technology than the community. Gemini Space is a comfy change of pace.